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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, is getting serious about entering the virtual reality (VR) space, according to a report from Protocol. A source close to the situation told the outlet that the company plans on investing “tons of money” to develop VR-related content.It looks like a large portion of ByteDance’s investment is going into hiring. As noted by Protocol, over 40 job listings have popped up for Pico, the Chinese VR headset maker ByteDance acquired last year. Most openings are for Pico Studios’ west coast-based branches in California and Washington, ranging from a head of VR game strategy to a game operation manager. Other open positions suggest an increased focus on Pico’s VR hardware, including an optical engineer and a... Continue reading…

The Sonos Roam is selling for $143.20 instead of $179.99 for a limited time. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Welcome to the weekend! We’re kicking things off today with a rare deal on the superb Sonos Roam, which remains one of the best Bluetooth speakers we’ve ever tested. Regularly $179.99, you can currently buy it from Best Buy, B&H Photo, and Sonos for just $143.20, the speaker’s best price to date. That’s less than the typical cost of the cheaper Sonos Roam SL, which is essentially the same speaker but without the built-in microphone.The pint-sized, portable speaker sounds great and comes equipped with a number of useful features, including support for Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple’s AirPlay 2. The Sonos speaker also integrates with the rest of the company’s ecosystem and comes with an IP67 dust and water resistance rating,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Telegram will soon start putting some features behind a paywall (via TechCrunch). In a post on the platform, founder Pavel Durov announced that the messaging service is launching a paid Telegram Premium subscription later this month, giving users “additional features, speed and resources.”Durov hints at some of the features coming with the subscription, including early access to new features, the ability to upload larger files, and Premium-only stickers and reactions (which were recently previewed in a beta version of the app).But Durov also makes it clear that Telegram’s existing features will stay free, and that the paid features won’t affect the experience for free users on the app. Non-subscribers will still get to look at the... Continue reading…

Drop’s black-on-white DCX keycaps installed on a Filco Majestouch 2. Earlier this year, keyboard specialist Drop announced its new lineup of DCX keycaps. But rather than focusing on making flashy, colorful designs like most aftermarket keycaps, the first three sets to use the new DCX profile are relatively understated, with simple black-and-white designs or a small selection of primary colors.That’s because the focus here is on getting the tiniest details right in the hopes that Drop’s sets might be able to compete directly with GMK’s — a German manufacturer commonly seen as the producer of some of the best-quality keycaps around. GMK produces keycaps in the “Cherry” profile (which refers to the overall shape of the keycaps) while “DCX” refers to the profile of Drop’s keycaps. I’ve had the chance to... Continue reading…

It’s changed the language users will see when they go to pay. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple announced on Friday that it once again updated its rules about how Dutch dating apps can use third-party payment systems, after the company had “productive conversations with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM).”The updated rules give developers more flexibility about which payment systems they use, change the language users see when they go to pay, and remove other restrictions that the previous rules put in place. The ACM has expressed approval of these changes, noting Apple “will meet the requirements... set under European and Dutch competition rules.”While the rules aren’t wide-reaching (again, they only apply to Dutch dating apps), they do show what Apple’s willing to do to comply with government... Continue reading…

Entergalactic. | Image: Netflix Sandman, Umbrella Academy, Resident Evil, and much more Continue reading…

The one true Duke. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have no idea who Duke Nukem even is — that’s how hard the classic video game franchise cratered a decade ago. Today, the character is mostly known as a punchline for video game vaporware jokes, about how Duke Nukem Forever spent 14 years in development hell only to become a huge flop.And yet for years now, Duke’s corporate owners have been whispering that a movie is coming, culminating in The Hollywood Reporter’s story today: Legendary Entertainment has tapped Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg to actually produce a feature film.I don’t quite know how to react! As a gamer who actually quite liked Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem II and Duke Nukem 3D, I absolutely agree that this... Continue reading…

“Instantly” is only a slight exaggeration. Capcom has launched a demo of Resident Evil Village that’s powered by Google’s Stadia cloud gaming tech, letting people test out the horror game in a browser. In a press release, Google says that the idea is to let people try out the game, no matter what device they own. The game and its demo were already available for Stadia subscribers, but now anyone can try it out for free, provided they have a supported web browser and an internet connection faster than 10 megabits a second. You don’t even need a Google account; you just navigate to the website, enter your birthday (the game’s rated M), and click the play button.As for how the demo looks... you certainly get what you pay for with the browser version. Here are a few comparison shots... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One perk most wireless carriers offer to pull you to their side is a free streaming video-on-demand subscription, but now AT&T won’t be giving HBO Max to new customers, and hasn’t replaced it with a different service either. The carrier stealthily discontinued its top-tier Unlimited Elite plan for new subscribers this week, and added a new one that doesn’t include HBO Max anymore, as reported by Next TV (via FierceWireless).The new top plan is called Unlimited Premium, which comes in at the same $85 a month for a single line. Just like with the now-grandfathered Elite plan, Premium subscribers get unlimited talk / text / data, 4K video streaming, and no slowdowns even if they use a lot of data (a promise AT&T introduced for its priciest... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla is asking its shareholders to approve a three-way stock split to help make the company’s shares cheaper for buyers.The request is included in a list of provisions Tesla is planning to bring up at its August 4, 2022 shareholder meeting, which it filed Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Tesla is framing it as way to “reset” its stock price, which has gone up dramatically in the past few years — 43.5 percent since the company’s last stock split in August 2020.“While this value appreciation has led to our employees benefiting enormously through the years, we want to make sure all employees, no matter when they join, have access to the same advantages,” the company states.Tesla is framing it as way to “reset”... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao has beaten her own record from three years ago for the number of digits calculated for pi. In 2019 she was able to calculate pi to its 31.4 trillionth digit, and now, using the same Google Cloud y-cruncher program Iwao was able to find pi to its 100 trillionth digit, which is zero.After starting the process in October 2021 it took the computers until March 2022 to finish. At 157 days, compared to 121 days spent figuring out a shorter number in 2019, it was going more than twice as fast. According to Iwao, she was using the same tools and techniques, but the enhanced speed is due to how the parts of Google Cloud have improved since then with 100Gbps networking, balanced Persistent Disks,... Continue reading…

Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images The US will reportedly no longer require international air travelers to take a COVID test before traveling to the country. According to Reuters, the change will be effective starting Sunday morning, June 12th, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will reevaluate the decision in three months. That means people flying into the US won’t have to worry about taking a COVID test before take-off, at least until the summer travel season is over.Before the reported change, vaccinated and unvaccinated passengers had to get a test the day before they entered the US, according to the CDC’s travel requirement page. The only exceptions were children under two years old, who did not have to be tested.Airlines called on the... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix This week, Netflix unleashed a battery of announcements as a part of its Geeked Week. Contained within the flurry of reveals of The Sandman, The Umbrella Academy season 3, One Piece, and more was a handful of announcements about the platform’s slowly growing game and game-adjacent offerings.Netflix showed off a brief teaser for Cuphead season 2 ahead of its August premiere, featuring more of Ms. Chalice (voiced by Grey DeLisle), who made her brief debut at the end of the first season. Also hitting Netflix in August is the third season of DOTA: Dragon’s Blood. Tekken, the fighting game that has a fondness for throwing kids off cliffs, is also getting its own anime, Tekken: Bloodline.In advance of Sonic Origins later this June and S... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After six months of slow progress, the Senate is closer than ever to instituting new tech antitrust rules — and the industry is fighting harder than ever to bring it down.Sponsored by a bipartisan group including Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in January and is poised for a full Senate vote in the coming weeks. But the bill is facing intense pushback from tech industry groups and shaping up as a major test of tech companies’ political muscle in Congress.In a joint press conference on Wednesday, the bill’s cosponsors emphasized the bill’s bipartisan support among senators. “At its core, this is about lowering... Continue reading…

Netflix Dragon Age, the D&D-inspired franchise from BioWare, is getting a brand-new six-episode anime on Netflix. Dragon Age: Absolution is a new show set in the previously unseen Tevinter Imperium.Not much is known about the show so far. It’s being produced by Red Dog Culture House and the showrunner is Mairghread Scott. She previously worked on a number of Transformers animated shows and the animated Guardians of the Galaxy show. We know it's being made in collaboration with BioWare, which last week announced the title of the next Dragon Age game, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. As with Dreadwolf, the cast, characters, and even the plot of Absolution are unknown at this time.What we do know is it's set in the Tevinter Imperium. Tevinter is an... Continue reading…

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson (far right) and Philippe Baptiste, president of CNES, signing the Artemis Accords at the French Ambassador’s Residence in Washington. | Image: NASA/Keegan Barber On Tuesday evening, France officially signed onto NASA’s Artemis Accords — the space agency’s set of guidelines and principles for how the US and other countries should explore the Moon in the future. France’s addition, long considered a big get for the Artemis Accords, brings the total number of signatory countries to 20, strengthening the international agreement ahead of NASA’s planned return to the lunar surface this decade.When the finalized Artemis Accords were presented during the Trump administration in October 2020, NASA announced that eight countries had signed onto the document — including the United States. But there were some notable absences from that list. Two of the world’s largest space superpowers — China and Russia —... Continue reading…

Kamala Khan testing out out her limits in the field. | Image: Marvel Studios Disney Plus’ Ms. Marvel series is one of the MCU’s better recent entries, but Kamala Khan’s new live-action superpowers have been a point of contention for fans of the comics who are concerned about the show’s ability to translate the source material across mediums. Comics Ms. Marvel’s main thing is smashing stuff with her humongous fists. But her polymorphic “embiggening” powers are also a metaphor for the ways that Kamala, a Muslim-American teen born to Pakistani immigrants, moves through the world, and the creative team behind Ms. Marvel very much wanted that to be part of the show as well.In Marvel’s comics, Kamala develops the ability to morph her body into a variety of shapes in sizes, but in Ms. Marvel, she instead discovers that... Continue reading…

Hurricane Ida is seen in an image taken aboard the International Space Station in August 2021. | Image: European Space Agency via NASA NASA is gearing up to launch tiny satellites into space that will help forecasters keep a closer eye on tropical storms as they develop in a mission called TROPICS. Crucially, if the launches are successful, the satellites will mark a big advancement in our ability to watch rapidly intensifying storms.At the moment, NASA’s weather satellites can only check in on a storm every four to six hours. “So we’re missing a lot of what’s happening in the storm,” Bill Blackwell, principal investigator for the TROPICS mission and a researcher at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, said in NASA’s announcement yesterday. Image: NASA/NOAA Images taken from current weather satellites. Both the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder... Continue reading…

Meta Quest virtual reality headsets will soon offer an option for hanging out with other people in your homescreen. The v41 Quest update will add a multiuser Horizon Home space, which Meta announced last year at Connect. Horizon Home lets people put on their headsets and immediately invite other Quest users to jump into social experiences, including watching VR videos as a group. It’s a step toward a larger Horizon-branded “metaverse” that Meta has been rolling out piecemeal over the past few years.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Home’s rollout in a video with Free Solo climber Alex Honnold, offering a brief demo of the system. Zuckerberg and Honnold appear as Horizon’s traditional legless avatars and pop into a 360-degree video of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After Activision Blizzard refused to voluntarily recognize the union formed by QA testers at Raven Software — a subsidiary that works on the Call of Duty games — the testers went through the election process and voted to form a union last month. Now, Activision Blizzard’s current CEO Bobby Kotick told employees in a letter that the company recognizes the union and will “engage in good faith negotiations to enter into a collective bargaining agreement.”Getting here comes after news of layoffs late last year, followed by an employee walkout and a five-week strike. There was also the part where Activision Blizzard engaged in tactics that smelled of union busting, like suddenly converting other testers in the company to full-time jobs with... Continue reading…

Image: Dami Lee So, noted shitposter Elon Musk wants out of his Twitter deal, and he’s gotten his lawyers to write a lil letter to Twitter about it. According to the letter, Twitter is a bunch of big meanies that aren’t giving Musk the information he needs to close the transaction, specifically about bots and spam. According to the letter, this is very important for Twitter’s business model. There was a time to have this conversation, and it was during due diligence, which Musk waived. I’m very unsympathetic to both Musk and his lawyers here.Now, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has helpfully written about how M&A law works. Basically, Musk views this letter as a pretext for ending the deal:

One of the advantages that Chromebooks offer is the ability to run many of your favorite Android apps alongside Chrome OS windows. For the most part, any Chromebook that was launched on or after 2019 will run Android apps; if you’ve got an older system, Google has a long list of the Chromebooks that can run Android apps, but it’s not difficult to see if yours is one of them by doing the following:

Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.This week on the show, the crew runs through all the announcements from Apple’s WWDC keynote event on Monday: the new features added in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, the expansion of CarPlay, the new flagship M2 processor, a redesigned MacBook Air, and a whole lot more.Keep listening for the other important tech news from this week, including the EU legislation to force all future smartphones to use USB-C and Xbox’s game streaming app coming to TVs.Stories mentioned in this... Continue reading…

Larry Ellison, Oracle board chairman and chief technology officer. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Just after closing a $28 billion deal to acquire electronic health records company Cerner, tech giant Oracle said it thinks it can solve one of the biggest tech problems in healthcare: patient records.The combined companies will create a national health records database that pulls in data from thousands of hospitals, said Larry Ellison, Oracle board chairman and chief technology officer, during a press briefing. Patient data would be anonymous until individuals give consent to share their information. “We’re building a system where all American citizens’ health records not only exist at the hospital level, but they also are in a unified national health records database,” Ellison said.Ellison outlined the well-trodden problems with the... Continue reading…

Insteon users have rescued the failing company. | Image: Insteon Following the report yesterday that smart home company Insteon’s servers had mysteriously fired up overnight, there is good news: Insteon is back, and it was resurrected by its customers. This message appeared on the Insteon blog today, posted by the company's new CEO Ken Fairbanks:

“Teddy bears on the moon, digital art,” created by DALL-E. Thoughts on my first week with OpenAI’s amazing text-to-image AI tool Continue reading…

Image: Square Enix The long-awaited second part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake could be revealed on June 16th, or at least I hope it will. Square Enix’s Twitter account for promoting that game sent out a Save the Date PSA for June 16th at 6PM ET / 3PM PT, when it’ll go live on Twitch and YouTube with a brief 10-minute presentation. It appended “please be excited” to the end, which, I’ll admit, made me excited.Is Part 2 releasing in 2023? Will there be a Part 3? Is the first installment ever going to be released on the Xbox? So many questions.

Gary Vaynerchuk (left) spent hours taking selfies with fans. Hype and hustle at Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT conference Continue reading…

Ethan Peck’s Spock is about to engage in some shenanigans. | Image: John Medland/Paramount Plus In the age of thunderingly loud blockbusters and hyper-serial prestige television, Star Trek has struggled. The J.J. Abrams films tried to reinvent Star Trek for the mega action film era, and Star Trek: Discovery tried to reinvent it for serial TV. And others, like Picard and Lower Decks, have just tried to play to the fans with intense nostalgia and in-jokes. They’ve all been Star Trek, but they haven’t had quite the same impact as the original series or the Star Trek series of the ‘90s. Watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds feels like watching The Next Generation or Voyager or even The Original Series. It’s Star Trek updated pitch perfectly for 2022, and that’s in large part because it knows what we want: filler episodes.The... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Another NFT on the wall Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Mozilla will let extensions use the most privacy-preserving blocking techniques on network traffic Continue reading…

The device now tracks breathing disturbances and generates a comprehensive sleep report Continue reading…

The new reporting flow in action. | Image: Twitter Twitter’s redesigned process for reporting policy violations on its platform is now widely available, the company has announced. It’s designed to handle everything from reports about misinformation and spam, to harassment and hate speech. The redesign has been in testing since December last year, and uses a so-called “symptoms-first reporting flow” that’s designed to make it easier to report bad behavior. It’s now available in “most countries” across web, iOS, and Android.The company outlined how the new process works in a blog post last year. Previously, Twitter’s process would ask which policy has been broken, and then ask for more details. Instead, the new flow asks for details on what’s happened, before getting more granular about... Continue reading…

Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Rapper Jay-Z and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have teamed up to launch a bitcoin-focused financial literacy project named The Bitcoin Academy. The project consists of free bi-weekly classes, offered in-person and online, for residents of the musician’s childhood home: the Marcy Houses public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York City.The team-up is not surprising considering the pair’s long, shared history in business and bitcoin. Dorsey’s digital-payments company Block (née Square) bought a majority share in Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service in 2021, and the two have used their personal bitcoin holdings to fund a trust designed to promote the use of cryptocurrency in Africa and India.Attendees will be learn “about Bitcoin specifically... Continue reading…

This is second Brompton e-bike recall since April 2021. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge If you own a Brompton folding electric bicycle sold between May 2019 and March 2022 you should stop riding it immediately. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) agency in the US, ten owners of Brompton e-bikes have reported objects getting trapped between the mudguard and front tire causing the wheel to lockup and crash. So far, this has resulted in two hospitalizations and nine injuries including “head and facial impact, broken bones, shoulder dislocation, bruising, and chipped teeth.”Owners of the recalled models — which include the Brompton Electric M2L, H2L, M6L, and H6L — are urged to contact an authorized Brompton dealer to request a free repair. The fix involves replacing the front mudguard stay and flap to... Continue reading…

Ikea’s upcoming record player. | Image: Ikea Ikea, which has never been scared to dive into new product categories, has announced plans to release a record player as part of its new Obegränsad collection this fall. The record player was designed in collaboration with house music supergroup Swedish House Mafia, and has a chunky design in line with a lot of the other consumer electronics Ikea has produced. Alongside it, the Swedish retailer has also announced an armchair and desk as part of the collection.This technically isn’t the first record playing device that Ikea has announced. Way back in 2018 it announced a turntable made in collaboration with Teenage Engineering that it hoped to release the following year. But according to a Teenage Engineering support page, the player... Continue reading…

Ikea’s upcoming record player. | Image: Ikea Ikea, which has never been scared to dive into new product categories, has announced plans to release a record player as part of its new Obergränsad collection this fall. The record player was designed in collaboration with house music supergroup Swedish House Mafia, and has a chunky design in line with a lot of the other consumer electronics Ikea has produced. Alongside it, the Swedish retailer has also announced an armchair and desk as part of the collection.This technically isn’t the first record playing device that Ikea has announced. Way back in 2018 it announced a turntable made in collaboration with Teenage Engineering that it hoped to release the following year. But according to a Teenage Engineering support page, the player... Continue reading…

Windows 11 File Explorer with a Home page and Tabs | Image: Microsoft It’s been about four years since Microsoft tested and then abandoned an attempt at adding tabbed browsing to the File Explorer in Windows 10, and now a new Windows 11 preview build released today is giving it another shot. EarTrumpet developer Rafael Rivera spotted hints of the test in March before Microsoft confirmed that the feature, as well as the new Home screen for File Explorer you can see above, is coming to Windows 11.A post on the Windows Insider Blog explains that Build 25136 is testing a File Explorer browser with tabs so you can jump back and forth across folders without popping open a new window. However, even if you’re a Windows Insider and your PC is set to receive Dev Channel builds (for people who are willing to... Continue reading…

Striking Distance Studios Everybody’s going to space Continue reading…

The Last of Us Part I is finally coming to PCs. | Image: Naughty Dog Earlier today, a forum post at ResetEra pointed out a leaked listing on the PlayStation Direct site (via IGN) that confirmed the previously rumored PS5 remake of The Last of Us — the first one, that is — and its release date of September 2nd. There was also word that a PC version is “in development.” That sets up Joel and Ellie’s adventure to follow in the footsteps of the PC ports for updated older PlayStation exclusives like God of War, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, and Horizon: Zero Dawn.Now, during the Summer Game Fest 2022 event, the team from Naughty Dog confirmed all of that news with the official trailer, a few more details about the HBO series, and more information about the standalone multiplayer game they’re making... Continue reading…

Apple’s AirTag location tracker is on sale at Amazon and Best Buy. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’re an iPhone owner planning on traveling this summer, today’s deal on Apple AirTag location trackers has arrived at the perfect time. Right now, you can buy Apple’s ultra wideband-capable Bluetooth tracker to keep track of your luggage and other items for just $24 instead of $29 from Amazon and Best Buy (until 10PM PT today or June 10th at 1AM ET). That might be a small discount, but it’s also a rare one and the best price we’ve seen.This is an excellent tracker that works best with Apple devices and is ideal for those deeply embedded within the Apple ecosystem. It’s conveniently also IP67 water and dust resistant with user-replaceable batteries. Plus, the tracker also offers a few privacy and security features, like end-to-end... Continue reading…

Image: Meta Meta has decided to not sell the first version of its full-fledged AR glasses, codenamed Orion, and will instead distribute them to developers so they can build software experiences for the device and future versions, a person familiar with the matter told The Verge. The company is also shelving plans to release a smartwatch with a detachable display and two cameras in favor of a design better suited to control a later version of the glasses.The first version of the AR glasses, which have been in development for three years, was always going to be geared toward developers and early adopters, but executives hadn’t decided whether to sell them broadly until now, the person said. Employees working in Meta’s Reality Labs division building... Continue reading…

The Portal Go, released in 2021. | Photo by Jennifer Pattisson Tuohy The Verge Meta plans to stop making consumer versions of its Portal video calling hardware and instead pivot the product line to focus on use cases for businesses, like conference calling.The change in strategy, first reported by The Information and confirmed to The Verge by a source familiar with the matter, comes as Meta is reassessing its ambitious hardware plans against investor concerns about the billions of dollars it’s spending on projects that have yet to pay off financially. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.The Portal line debuted in 2018 with two displays meant as dedicated video calling stations. They also supported apps for activities like listening to music on Spotify and streaming videos on the Food Network. But the... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge It has only been a few days since Apple introduced a new generation of its custom chip family with the M2 and a round of updated laptops, including the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. But even though the WWDC 2022 keynote is over, the rumor mill never stops. Now, there are more reports about what’s next in Apple’s pipeline, and several of the items will feel very familiar.Over at Bloomberg, Mark Gurman’s latest report based on his sources claims that updated 14- and 16-inch M2-based MacBook Pros could ship at the end of this year or in early 2023. These will come with M2 Max chips that expand on the 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores of their highest-end predecessor with 12 CPU cores and up to 38 GPU cores.Make room for more... Continue reading…

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Apple retail workers at the Grand Central store in New York are unionizing with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) rather than Workers United as originally planned. The move is part of a broad organizing push at Apple retail stores across the country, where workers in Maryland, Georgia, and Kentucky have announced union campaigns. If any of the stores are successful, it will represent the first union of Apple employees in the United States.In a press release, both unions framed the move as a positive step toward consolidating worker power across the country. “CWA has a national plan that will lead to density and collective power for Apple Retail workers,” said Lynne Fox, international president of Workers United. “It is... Continue reading…

Street Fighter V is one of 11 games included in the Humble bundle. | Image: Capcom If you’re hyped up today for gaming news, there’s a very special deal running now that you should check out. Humble has a new bundle collecting a whole slew of big Capcom hits from the last few years, including some remastered PS2-era classics. Some of the most notable include Street Fighter V, Devil May Cry 5, and Monster Hunter: World. As is often the case with a Humble bundle, proceeds go to charities, the developers, and Humble itself. This one has contributions going toward the ACLU and The Trevor Project.As for the bundle itself, you can get in on the full package of 11 titles for $20 (or more, if you are in the charitable mood). At full price, these Capcom games are valued at $224 — so you’re getting a huge discount of over 90... Continue reading…

Image: Spotify This article first ran in Hot Pod Insider, The Verge’s audio industry newsletter.Spotify wants to make audiobooks the next pillar of its business. On Wednesday, company executives pitched the audiobooks business to investors as their next target for industry domination. When they launch the audiobooks vertical (which is TBD), it could have huge ramifications not only for Spotify’s own business, but for the publishing industry as well.“We believe that audiobooks, in their many different forms, will be a massive opportunity,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said. “And just as we’ve done in podcasting, expect us to play to win.”“Just as we’ve done in podcasting, expect us to play to win.”Spotify’s first big step into that business is its... Continue reading…

The federal government is upgrading its investigation into over a dozen incidents of Tesla vehicles using Autopilot that crashed into emergency vehicles. The probe is now designated as an “Engineering Analysis,” which is the second and final phase of an investigation before a possible recall.This next phase will involve additional tests and crash analyses “to explore the degree to which Autopilot and associated Tesla systems may exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in documents posted on its website Thursday.Exploring how Autopilot may “exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety risks”The... Continue reading…

Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images Today, NASA announced that it is putting together an independent team of researchers this fall to study sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, the updated term now used to refer to UFOs. The space agency says it plans to study these sightings from a scientific perspective but also stressed that “there is no evidence UAPs are extra-terrestrial in origin.”The study team, to be led by astrophysicist David Spergel under NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, will attempt to identify what data is out there on UAPs and figure out how to best capture data on UAPs in the future. NASA noted that the limitations in sightings make it hard to come to logical conclusions about where UAPs come from. The researchers will also try to... Continue reading…